Over the years significant effort has been devoted to the design of various educational toys. Such toys include letter building blocks, books with audio-visual cues, and even more complicated systems involving such things as audio-visual cues and computer controlled learning routines.
The importance of such devices cannot be overemphasized in view of the overwhelming evidence that educational development of children, throughout their entire lives, has been shown to be greatly advanced by the earliest possible teaching of various concepts. In the society which we have today, where technology is so important and success is, often, tied to an ability to deal with technology, the appreciation of such physical phenomena as spatial relationships is of great importance.
However, while such toys as building blocks, play logs, and the like do teach certain limited spatial relationships, many aspects of educational development are neglected by the same. For example such toys fail to clarify the concepts of full and empty space, the concept of surfaces divorced from volume, plastic manipulation of one form into another, together with stimulated ideas that would flow from the consideration of such concepts by the child.